A stranger emailed me a warning about blood clots. Days later, my friend died from one.
At first, Todd Robertson’s email was just another unsolicited pitch from a stranger asking for a story on a cause that had become his passion.
It was just another pitch, that is, until I was headed to my friend Scot’s funeral over the weekend in Kansas City.
Robertson wrote to me March 1, the start of Blood Clot Awareness Month. He even added bold text for emphasis.
“I'm asking for a story,” he pleaded. “A story not about me, but about the awareness that is needed. Too many people are dying. If you were to walk up to anyone on the street and ask them what a pulmonary embolism was … or asked about blood clots in general, they would be clueless.”
Journalists receive these sorts of messages every day. One of the first rules of badgering us to pay attention is that we don’t tend to be stirred by a themed month or an awareness campaign. We crave a unique character and a timely, compelling hook driven by news. And, yes, conflict does help.
Robertson, 53, went on to explain that little more than a month before writing me he had been lucky to survive a pulmonary embolism (PE), a blood clot that had passed through his heart and lodged in his lung but didn’t kill him.
I was sympathetic but ultimately unmoved. I replied with a nice note — a gentle letdown that becomes something of an art form if you stick around long enough in this business.
“I’m glad that you’re doing OK, and that you’re getting the word out,” I wrote. “I don’t really target anything to awareness months.”
Less than two weeks later, I was blindsided by my timely, compelling and utterly horrible hook.
A good friend of mine since our college days, Scot Squires, keeled over and died from the very same thing: an undetected blood clot. While on a walk with his 12-year-old daughter.
After the initial shock, my mind reeled back to Robertson’s email. I felt guilty for having given him short shrift. It seemed as if the universe was compelling me to write what I should have written in the first days of March.
“I just had a forty-something friend in K.C. die of a blood clot on the street, suddenly,” I wrote Robertson. “I'm ready to talk.”
Robertson responded with immediate empathy. A devoted canoe paddler, he works as outreach coordinator for river programs for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources,
Three years ago he fell off a canoe trailer and ripped open the back of his leg. His aggressively clotting blood landed him in the hospital for 12 days. A year later, his swollen, purple foot signaled yet another clot.
That’s when concerned doctors discovered that he suffers from the Factor V Leiden genetic mutation of the blood protein that controls clotting, the homozygous variety that he inherited from both his parents. That makes Robertson far likelier to suffer a clot and put him on daily blood thinners for life.
The clot that nearly killed him was signaled by a “super sharp pain down just above my waist,” which he didn’t realize emanated from the back of his lung. He had been off blood thinners for several days around the time of a colonoscopy, which may have been a factor. After a few grueling days he finally visited a walk-in clinic and soon was ushered into an ambulance and rushed to Mercy Medical Center where he had been born.
Robertson thinks back to when he was 19 and helped his mom struggle into the passenger seat of their Buick LeSabre. She was just 42 and complaining of chest pains. During the drive from their home in West Des Moines' Valley Junction district, she fell silent, and her lips turned blue. Robertson veered into a pharmacy parking lot and called an ambulance. His mom died in the car seat next to him, from what he now suspects was a blood clot.
Robertson in his life has endured compounded grief from medical trauma. He’s also a widower whose wife, Roycene, died in 2013 from brain cancer.
His recent brush with death made him resolve to channel his outreach coordinator skills into raising awareness for what he considers a modern silent killer that according to the National Blood Clot Alliance is responsible the deaths of 274 Americans every day.
“They feel the cramp," Robertson said of people who unwittingly suffer blood clot symptoms, "the Charley horse in their calf, and blow it off — then die of a pulmonary embolism."
A champion of the underdog, gone too soon
My friend Scot in his day was a fast runner and always more of an athlete than me. I never expected to be attending his funeral.
Scot, 49, had been nursing a nagging pain in his calf after injuring his leg late last year in Colorado. But it wasn't bad enough that he really remarked on it to friends.
He and his daughter were on the verge of taking a spring break trip to Puerto Rico with another college friend in our circle, who happens to be a doctor in Des Moines. They were about to meet up and fly out of Kansas City.
Scot collapsed only about 5 minutes down the street from the hospital. So it wasn't a question of access to emergency care. It was a matter of helping prod those in his situation to recognize and act on the early warning signs.
My doctor friend ended up at St. Luke’s that Sunday, March 12, not quite knowing what he would find after a confusing flurry of messages. Instead of finalizing vacation plans with Scot, he was shouting in his best friend's ear to encourage him to pull through. But hospital staff already had spent 90 minutes trying to revive him, with sobbing family members in orbit.
Even a doctor’s training doesn’t blunt the grief of suddenly standing at your friend's deathbed.
The clot basically asphyxiated Scot internally, cutting off his circulation. You feel yourself breathing, yet no oxygen reaches you.
I didn't expect death of this variety to intrude on my peer group for at least another couple decades. This wasn't a freak car accident or a plane crash. It wasn't even a horrible disease like the cancer that killed Robertson's wife, where I would've had time to get mad and console Scot. This was a mundane malfunction in plumbing that could have been prevented. It makes me feel all too fragile. Makes me rethink my everyday priorities.
I've drifted awake in the middle of the night this week, suddenly remembering some forgotten kindness he had paid me.
The circle of friends that Scot was a part of remains a comfort. All of us had enough fun together early in life that we could blackmail each other into oblivion. And we still cherish each other’s company with its continuous soundtrack of laughter.
I take it as a good sign that when news of Scot's death began bouncing among all of us via texts and Facebook messages, that it had to be prefaced with a clarifying statement that this was not a joke. Considering the history of gallows humor among us, that was a distinct possibility.
I still can almost hear Scot’s devilish laugh. I remember how he was such a champion for the underdog with a passion for social justice.
He made selfless gestures big and small. Big: He donated a kidney to his sister. Small: He once agreed to be wrapped in strings of holiday lights and photographed for the cover of The Register's entertainment tabloid; I asked because I knew he was a joker at heart and would play along.
Scot, who grew up in Des Moines and later lived and worked here, was an accomplished educator full of empathy. Most recently he worked as administrative English language arts curriculum coordinator for Kansas City Public Schools.
He had an unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of the human spirit. One of his final Facebook posts was an account of another walk with his daughter, in December.
While on the way to the library they stumbled onto a gruesome murder scene where police had just begun to tape off the perimeter.
"After coming home to process what we saw at the crime scene," Scot wrote, he persuaded his daughter "to walk back to the library for these reasons:
"1. There are WAY more good people in the world than bad, and we are safe to walk wherever we want.
"2. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING will keep us from a new batch of library books."
Losing Scot feels like it will be a little harder to remember all those good people and their kindness among the daily drumbeat of bad news.
My doctor friend agrees with Robertson that while the medical community may be aware of the clot risk — illustrated by its pervasive use of blood thinners in hospitals — the public has yet to focus its attention. Blood clots haven’t hit the limelight in the same way as heart attacks, strokes or breast cancer. Or even the Heimlich maneuver.
So Robertson intends to start a local support group. He's organizing a national bicycle team of PE survivors.
“We can save lives here,” he said. “That’s what matters.”
I agree. If I can help prevent just one death, then this could be the most important column I’ve written.
These words arrived too late for Scot, but not for you.
Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).
How to help
Todd Robertson, an Iowa PE survivor launching his own blood clot awareness campaign, including a national bicycle team with custom jerseys, can be reached at clotawareness@gmx.com.
Contact that National Blood Clot Alliance in Virginia at 703-935-8845 or info@stoptheclot.org.
Signs and symptoms of blood clots
Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) occurs when a blood clot forms in one of the deep veins of your body, usually in your legs, but sometimes in your arm. Warning signs:
• Swelling, usually in one leg (or arm)
• Leg pain or tenderness often described as a cramp or Charley horse
• Reddish or bluish skin discoloration
• Leg (or arm) warm to touch
These symptoms of a blood clot may feel similar to a pulled muscle or a Charley horse, but may differ in that the leg (or arm) may be swollen, slightly discolored, and warm.
Contact your doctor as soon as you can if you have these symptoms, because you may need treatment right away.
Clots can break off from a DVT and travel to the lung, causing a pulmonary embolism (PE), which can be fatal. The signs and symptoms of a PE include:
• Sudden shortness of breath
• Chest pain-sharp, stabbing; may get worse with deep breath
• Rapid heart rate
• Unexplained cough, sometimes with bloody mucus
Call an ambulance or 911 immediately for treatment in the ER if you experience these PE symptoms.